On 2.13.25 we hosted an AMA and Q&A session to kickoff the launch of RIVALS. and provided further context, future goals and expectations of the first ever season.
Closed Captions are enabled! Listen through everything we have to share about this new engagement offering to all OU campuses.
Hear from the inaugural Tournament Organizer JTran, Director Moog, and Community & Labs Sr. Coordinator, Oculus.
*EA Sports, 2K Interactive, RIOT are not a sponsor of or affiliated with this tournament.
Like our epic peers in OU Fit & Rec, we now offer an OU ONLY opportunity for recreational competition. Introducing "RIVALS", a recreational esports series of leagues and tournaments. OU Esports & Co-Curricular Innovation and The OU Gaming Club are now leveraging their staffing and venue to facilitate this programming for the entire OU community including Tulsa & HSC(OKC) campuses.
This means if you are within the walls of OU at any level and across any campus you can now join teams and leagues meant to provide another extracurricular activity of value to our population. Unlike our official esports teams that compete on behalf of OU, RIVALS is meant to foster good sportsmanship, create camaraderie & provide a safe environment for people to enjoy competitive gaming in a controlled elevated structure inside OU.
ALL OU Norman, Tulsa & HSC Campuses
- Student -
- Staff -
- Faculty -
- Campus Partners -
If you can use OU Single Sign-On for general OU services you are eligible to participate in RIVALS.
ADDITIONAL
NORMAN CAMPUS ONLY: Utilize the Venue for up to 3hrs/day for OFFICIAL matches. Use your personal license on our hardware if you want to switch up where you play.
Start Week: March 9th
Declared Game Nights: Tues @ 7PM CST
Duration: 4 Weeks + Weekend 4 Playoffs/Finals
Guaranteed Matches: 6-8
LAN Finals: April 12th, Black Box Theater - Cross A - Norman
Prizing:
Cost: $15 per seat per semester (1 individual entry included with VIP Membership per school year)
Start Week: March 9th
Declared Game Nights: Wed @ 7PM CST
Duration: 4 Weeks + Weekend 4 Playoffs/Finals
Guaranteed Matches: 6-8
LAN Finals: April 12th, Black Box Theater - Cross A - Norman
Prizing:
Cost: $15 per seat per semester (1 individual entry included with VIP Membership per school year)
Start Week: March 9th
Declared Game Nights: Thurs @ 7PM CST
Duration: 4 Weeks + Weekend 4 Playoffs/Finals
Guaranteed Matches: 6-8
LAN Finals: April 12th, Black Box Theater - Cross A - Norman
Prizing:
Cost: $15 per seat per semester (1 individual entry included with VIP Membership per school year)
Start Week: March 23rd
Declared Game Nights: Wednesdays @ 7PM CST
Duration: 3 Weeks + Weekend 3 Playoffs/Finals
Guaranteed Matches: 3-5
Allowed Team Size: 5-7
LAN Finals: April 12th, Black Box Theater - Cross A - Norman (Apr 13, if necessary)
Prizing:
Cost: $75 per team ($15 per seat) per semester
Foundation: Our goals in the OU Gaming Club have always been to be the hub for all things organized gaming and esports initiatives at OU. From a simple community event all the way up to an organized event/program for the entire university, we want gaming cultures to be celebrated and leveraged to improve the OU experience.
Opportunity: Our first season and collaboration is a statement in OU ECCI and the Gaming Club's intentions to integrate student opportunities across all things we attempt to do. If you scroll to the bottom of this page you'll see how you can get involved as an RSO/Greek Life/Business with our RIVALS series specifically.
What does Phi Delta Alpha gain? Fundraising through helping us market and promote further in titles that are aligned with their communities. After our operations costs are covered, the rest serves as a fundraiser for Phi Dee.
Who can collaborate? Any RSO/Greek Life, university departments, alumni, and external businesses pending our approval. Reach out to esports@ou.edu!
STEP 1: Head to our payment portal and pay league fee.
STEP 2: Look for an email get into the Discord and initial steps on getting put in the correct league and access to all communications.
STEP 3: Hop in the Discord, we'll verify your registration, issue your permissions and then you'll see all our resource to participate in the league week to week.
STEP 4: GAME ON!
Declared game nights are a starting point to establish scheduling and ease logistics on participants. Rescheduling matches is allowed if both competitors agree. The ONLY requirement is that matches must be completed and reported in the RIVALS Discord by 11:59PM CST on Friday nights. This allows us to update brackets, enjoy the weekend and get everyone squared away heading into the following week.
We want to provide as much flexibility as possible within reason and active communication and feedback is how we polish up our intentions. Share ideas with us always if you think there are better opportunities.
With the inclusion of team-based leagues thee need to assist others with finding teammates is equally important and really the whole point to everything we do. Whilep we do maintaina massive OU Gaming Club General Community Discord, which ALL are absolutely welcome to join, we have created a new RIVALS specific Discord Server to keep this focus intentional. This new Discord server maintains all the governance, oversight and enforcement we've built up since we started our timeline in 2016.
Game nights are declared to assist with scheduling and respecting YOUR time. However, rescheduling is absolutely allowed when both parties agree. In the end, all we care about is the score is reported by 11:59PM CST on Fridays.
Rulebooks are meant to be dynamic, wordy, and thorough, but when we talk about Sooner Dojo Series, Sooner Rivals Series, In-Houses, One-off Events, and more we could have varying documents with different formats scattered everywhere. Instead as we execute new events over time we will add and evolve this singular document and it's table of contents to only have one source to reference for all event types under the OU Gaming Club banner regardless of their classification.
The RIVALS events are all about celebrating competition and will often have a diverse range of ages backgrounds and audiences depending on the time of year. However, that does not mean we will tolerate any toxicity, excessive use of profanity or any discriminatory and/or hateful verbiage.
If we feel you are in violation of our community standards and expectations you will be advised to adjust your behavior. If you continue to behave in a negative way you will forfeit the season.
Why low-key? Because not everyone has the time or opportunity to be a part of the esports journey at the highest tier. The OU Gaming Club Rivals Series is aimed at putting on a well-run evolving league to promote extra-curricular activity for all in a positive sportsmanlike culture. This also involves a physical lan with staging, live production, commentary, weekly standings and prizing. Here's your chance!
ALL LEAGUE OPERATIONS ARE FACILIATED THROUGH DISCORD IN REAL-TIME.
Each title(game) league will have a declared night where matches should be completed. Reschedules are allowed when a mutual agreement is had with your opponent. All games must be reported before the following Saturday at the latest each week. The first five(5) weeks are facilitated virtually. In week 5, the following Saturday will host the top 4 players from each title at a physical LAN finals with full production and are welcome to bring guests.
LAN, or Local Area Network, is also a term used in esports events and gaming culture to identify an in-person event. Week 5 takes the top 4 players/teams and gives them the opportunity to close out the season face to face against their competition. Use your licenses on our hardware and invite your friends and family to support. Games are always preloaded and updated allowing us to get right into it.
The beauty of video games is that they are just a computer application with a database and many allow for performance analytics to be tracked automatically. Depending on the title we will create weekly performance reports to elevate the competition and inspire improvement more and more.
The goal is to have RIVALS include the entire OU population. For now, the home will stay in Norman for the LAN Finals, but as we work on building the communities across all three(3) campuses the goal will be to take it on tour every semester with accomodations for travel.
Norman - Black Box Theater (Cross A)
For competitors on or near Norman campus, for official match nights we will make our venue in Cross B available to you for your match play up to three(3) hours per day. Leverage your game license with our hardware and network. Learn more about our facility specifications here below.
Esports is an entertainment industry! Without production it is just playing video games. Make it to the final 4 LAN have your matches streamed on official OU Twitch channels with shoutcasters, commercials, and reactions all LIVE and saved for your replay through YouTube.
ALL OU Norman, Tulsa & HSC Campuses
- Student -
- Staff -
- Faculty -
- Campus Partners -
If you can use OU Single Sign-On for general OU services you are eligblle to participate in RIVALS.
Each league is $20 per seat/person. In future leagues we will introduce actual team based leagues but will start only with 1v1 formats initially. Everyone can participate in multiple leagues if they choose, but each will cost $20.
Additionally if you are an OU Gaming Club VIP Member you get one league registration fee waived per school year with your membership. (July to June)
All funds go to pay the following items:
- Annual league tool fees
- Seasonal staffing to manage leagues
- Staffing for final LAN playoffs with production
- Prizing
Discord is modern and has been our digital home for all communications since we started all this energy at OU back in 2016. We know our 3.8K+ OU Gaming Club Discord Server is packed with a ton of channels and dialogue so we created a Rivals specific Discord server to keep this extremely focused.
Discord will allow for easy league updates, score reporting, communication circulation, match making, standings management and direct voice communications if needed regardless of platform as it can be used on both mobile and computer platforms alike. It's also actually integrated (somewhat) in the PS5 and XB Series consoles.
We'd prefer it and for the first couple of seasons we want to be lenient, but just know you'd be missing out on the experience, camaraderie, first bumps and documentation of your win in all forms.
As we continue to develop this energy we will be looking to further mitigate expenses for those travelling with food/drink additional door prizing, but those are future, Fall 2025 and on plans.
Absolutely! From sponsorsing ALL of the RIVALS efforts to just an individual specific title league.
This further expands in opportunity to registered student organizations. RSOs of any type can partner with us to have a league put on with their naming involved. With your assistance in marketing and getting signups we split revenue to be agreed upon before committing. How does this read publicly?
Example: THE OU GAMING CLUBS RIVALS SERIES - COLLEGE FOOTBALL EDITION presented by SPONSOR NAME benefiting RSO NAME
With the introduction of team based intramurals we will be working to find ways to help people find others to compete with. For now, we’ve created “free agent” channels in our RIVALS specific Discord to at least create a place for everyone to attempt to network and link up.
Part of the RIVALS registration fee is to also buy our own licenses for our 7-day venue catalog of games every year. This also means that you can reserve time to play your official matches in our venue. That entire process is detailed in our Discord Server once you register but they will be first-come first-serve and we will expand our availability for RIVALS in the FALL 2025 and on semesters.
Yes, However, in the Fall 2025 and on semesters we will start purchasing at least 2 licences of each game to create more opportunity for those that may not be able to afford their own consoles, hardware or licenses.
Additionally, using your own license and profile/account further secure the integrity of the competition.
We try our best to emphasize titles that can reduce as many variables as possible for people to participate.
For CFB/FC: You want to make sure you have cross play enabled on your platform. This can be achieved by going to the settings menu of your game, and finding the cross-play option and making sure that is toggled "on". Next you will want to access the EA ID menu by pushing the start button at the main menu of your game title, this will bring up your EA ID menu. From there you can search for your opponent's EA ID, accept friend requests, and game invites.
For NBA2K: You want to make sure you have cross play enabled on your console. This can be achieved by going to the settings menu of your game, and finding the cross-play option and making sure that is toggled "on". Then open the crossplay menu, navigate to the friends tab and selec search. From their you will be able to type in your opponent's name and send a friend request, or accept friends requests and game invites.
Each title will have different amounts like Rocket League being 3 players and Overwatch being 5. We will always impose a +2 roster limit to allow for flexibility in week to week variance.
However, the price does NOT increase due to the extra seats. We want to keep registration standardized.That means if its Valorant at 5 players we'd allow a team to register 7 total people for that roster but keep the price locked in at the team registration amount declared on the info.
Well we don't want you to be able to just flex in game. We also want you to have something to show for it. First, if you make the final four(4) your registration for that league will be refunded. This is to help with any costs to attend the actual final LAN in person.
We have partners we've worked with for years and will be working to stabilize and preemptively announce prizing before league starts. For the inaugural and first Spring 2025 season anticipate the prizing to be to equal over $100-$150 in total value with inclusion for 1st-3rd placements.
Regarding TEAMS prizing: We allocate prizing for the amount of contendors in the game itself. Meaning if it's Rocket League 3v3 then we're allocating prizing for 3. However, if your team is a total of 5, the team will decide what they do with their prizing. We will award the team with 3x prizing only.
OU Esport's athletes are students too. However, we do enforce that if a league is 3v3 or more that only 50% or less of the team can roster OU official team members.
OU Departments and outside businesses/alumni can sponsor leagues to gain promotion to all three campuses through our semesterly RIVALS leagues.
Why would you want to do this? Supporting OU student/staff programming through gaming and esports and reach a different demographic in our three current markets.
PERKS:
PRICING:
*All external entity brands must be approved by OU Esports & Co-Curricular Innovation and OU respective branding stakeholders.
Registered Student Organizations can partner with The OU Gaming Club for RIVALS benefit leagues. Why would you want to do this? Supporting OU gaming and esports programming and fundraising for your organization and/or cause.
EXPECTATIONS:
PRICING & EXPECTATIONS:
*All external charities must be approved by OU Esports & Co-Curricular Innovation and verification of the RSO submitting funds must be verified within 90 days after a leagues completion to retain ability for future partnerships.
OU Esports:
OU Gaming Club: